Response I: Presentism? A Time for Space: A “ham-fisted” Marxist geographer’s response
Sharad Chari
Ajay Skaria is characteristically thoughtful in his response to the debates surrounding James Sweet’s “ham-fisted” defense-and-apology following his article, “Is History History.” Skaria composes his response through three approaches to history: a ‘historial approach’ corresponding to a ‘regime of historicity’ linked to capitalism and the nation-state, and two ‘historical dispositions,’ not quite regimes, a ‘genealogical approach’ and a ‘historial approach.’ The parallax between the latter, he concludes, offers a critical vantage on the republican-democratic ambition of ‘the historical approach’ that cannot be faithful to its constitutive absences. I take this to be the gist of his argument, recognizing that adequate elaboration is impossible in such a brief piece. Skaria’s normative hopes lie in a different kind of democratic questioning enabled by the latter pair.
From a different vantage, I find the triad that Skaria mobilizes in response to the ‘presentism’ debate very suggestive. I offer a “ham-fisted” Marxist response, by which I mean the quotation marks to bring ham-fistedness into view, with its implicit denigration of large, clumsy, laboring hands, perhaps hands of the descendants of Ham. A ham-fisted Marxism refuses to separate working hands from theoretical elaboration, and in this, I take a slightly different route from Skaria via a multiplicity of strands in the Marxist tradition that I think approach Skaria’s triad differently, but also with a political compatibility with respect to our scholarly practice.
I respond through Marxist geography’s foundational refusal of something “Is History History” remains blind to the axiomatic separation of space and time and of the historical and geographical. Paraphrasing John Berger, it is space that hides consequences; but it does so precisely through the working of a regime of space and time linked in complex ways to capitalism, imperialism, nation-states, the bourgeoise hetero family and other related institutional forms, including the contemporary university (each as contradictory and differentiated phenomena, saturated with violence, and prone to breakdown.) I am more cautious than Skaria about the implication of mainstream academic history (or geography) in the reproduction of the dominant spatiotemporal regime. The relations between historical-geographical narratives, processes, epistemes, and spatiotemporal regimes remain a complex matter, as Michel-Rolph Truillot’s Silencing the Past pointed out long back, in ways germane to the ‘presentism’ debate.
There is, of course, a vast body of scholarship on the making of modern regimes of space and time. Marxist Geography, and in particular David Harvey’s reading of Henri Lefebvre, points to three kinds of relations between space and time distinct to our epoch. The first is the one I have just stated: ‘abstract’ time and space, linked to the discipline of the clock and cadaster, aided by money as a third key abstraction. We know that waged labor and private property the world over emerge and persist through differentiated spatial histories in which prior forms of time, space, and value persist. Lefebvre recognized that the production of ‘abstract space’ that accompanied the emergence of the absolutist state and of capitalism in Europe quickly became a ‘contradictory space’ which involved processes of abstraction and differentiation, not unlike Marx’s value dynamics. A vast body of work on late Victorian colonial capitalisms and their postcolonial aftermaths demonstrates that proletarianization and commodification retain the diversity of land-labor-credit relations built through the sublation (or preservation/ cancelation) of prior forms. Agrarian Marxism of the late nineteenth century and its revival in the last quarter of the twentieth century appreciated this ongoing production of agrarian difference rather than sameness in spatial histories of capital.
Henri Lefebvre with Leszek Kolakowski in Amsterdam, 9 March 1971. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The second kind of relation between time and space distinctive to our epoch, in this framework, is of ‘relative’ space-time circuits, which link space and time in routinized patterns of trade, money, information, labor, and so on. We might think of these circuits through Bourdieu’s habitus; Lefebvre’s insight is that this ‘relative’ space-time is also the site of dull and steady compulsion, in which forms of difference are folded into hegemonic space-times; think circuits of shopping, work, and the eternal return of the same on Netflix.
Marxist social history, at its best, held onto a sense of differentiation, combination, and struggle over absolute and relative space and time. Let us call this “ham-fisted” Marxism, with a wink and a raised fist. There is a normative commitment to democracy in these traditions, as Skaria notes, but also to varieties of communism; the agrarian Marxist revival was also a response to the Vietnam War, to renewed interest in peasant mobilization, and in imagined global circuits of Maoism. We might have to think more carefully about whether these traditions are as spent as Skaria suggests they might be or as coopted by republicanism in all their iterations and, therefore, what our political relation to them ought to be today. I take this to be the question emerging from the ‘presentism’ debate: can we be relevant to the politics of the present while maintaining methodological fidelity to the craft of spatial-historical research?
Lefebvre comes to a third relation between time and space by noting that while prior forms of difference are folded into abstract and relational space and time, they do not fully capture the constant production of embodied spatial difference, and this prompts a third relation, of ‘spacetime’ as indivisible and freighted with affect. This third term in the dialectical triad of ‘absolute’ space and time, ‘relative’ space-times, and ‘relational’ spacetimes is an unusual one, particularly since it is meant to be in dialectical relation with the other two modes and not something outside their regimes of operation. The relational helps us interpret how certain events seem to tunnel through spacetime, to be literally out of their time, as they claim to bring the legacies of slavery or caste domination or Indigenous genocide seemingly to the present. I say seemingly because were one only to think in the first two relations between time and space, it would be obvious that nobody can actually time travel and that in those registers, we are always already inhabitants of simultaneity. The relational prises open what appears to be a mono-temporal world to reveal it as much more palimpsestic than we might imagine. The collapsing of space and time in the relational imagination helps us read landscapes in which, while people and things might appear to be in the same Newtonian space and time, their lived and imagined senses of personhood and belonging may take them through substantially different spacetimes. Sumathi Ramaswamy’s beguiling book on a Tamil tradition of investment in the lost Indian Ocean continent of Lemuria helps us see this in a particular way. So does, quite differently, the imagination of white nationalism in the United States leading up to the storming of Congress. Indeed, there can be no intrinsic politics to ‘relational’ spacetimes; it would be a mistake to presume that (like ‘the subaltern’) they are always on the good side of history.
Relational spacetime also helps us understand our current moment of disturbance in what was once, for some, a placidly white, heteronormatively gendered academia. For those who have lived through academic institutions differently, with different classes, genders, races, ableist capacities, or inclinations, the range of indices of academic belonging, including research topics, methods, or narrative styles, can also reflect the affective and relational spacetime of academic life. David Graeber poses the modern university on a fast track from feudalism to neoliberalism, and for some, this fast track is a painful lived experience. But even this statement is an opportunity for our current moment of racial neoliberal restructuring, for Diversity and Inclusion imperatives and targeted hires which, while necessary, often place increased burdens on Black faculty. Once again, invocations of relative spacetime can have a variety of politics.
From a Marxist geographical perspective, these three regimes of space and time push Skaria’s framework. His notion of the dominant historical regime is differently legible through Lefebvre’s triad, as it relies on the modern production of absolute space and time, but also, crucially, on forms of circulation, including the circulation of academic expertise. It might also rely on forms of spatiotemporal tunneling, in which a white riot brings an imagination of long-aggrieved whiteness into the chambers of representative democracy or in which the ongoing police violence against Black people revives deep histories of slave patrols and lynching. Nationalism, heterosexism, and racism all rely on a variety of forms of affective investment that mobilize what might be imagined to be deep-spatiotemporal forms in the present. To refuse to see the present as a multiplicity of spacetimes, to take stock of these phenomena, is an analytical and political mistake.
I am therefore convinced alongside Skaria that the ‘presentism’ debate could benefit from reflecting on its conditions of possibility. I hope to have offered Marxist fodder for this task. Marxist social historians and geographers, at their best, have tended to keep their critical insights to absolute space and time and relative space-times. But several dissident Marxist traditions have also offered insights that bring the genealogical and what Skaria calls the historial into the frame, but in relation to the diagnosis of absolute and relative spacetimes as well.
Consider the fundamental Black Marxist insight, differently in the work of Cedric Robinson, Stuart Hall, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, or Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, that prior forms of ethno-racial difference are folded into and embolden the workings of capitalism, which we might therefore call ‘racial capitalism.’ This is exactly a genealogical approach to absolute and relative spacetimes. If there is a key figure whose forms of thought epitomize a genealogical approach to Marxism, it is Antonio Gramsci, whose ‘philological’ approach is both about language and about the recuperation of prior forms in the present, a present that can never actually be ‘presentist.’ Indeed, we might take seriously that across his prison notes when Gramsci turns to account for accumulating waves of historical change, for instance, in thinking through the embers of Jacobinism in the making and unmaking of the Risorgimiento, to events leading to fascism, the thing Gramsci is most consistent about is that he does not abide by fidelity to historical reconstruction. This is something he does not even seem to be that interested in, and not just because he writes while incarcerated. Instead, through a series of stylized spatial-historical sketches, his focus is steadfastly on what remains of prior forms in the contradictory apparatus of hegemony, and what might be renovated in a variety of popular forms to bring this apparatus down. This is a genealogical approach that, perhaps differently from the Neitzsche-Heidegger-Foucault-Derrida sequence that Skaria points to, holds onto the question of long-term dynamics in histories of power with attention to contradiction, breakdown, and struggle. That’s what makes it both a Marxist and genealogical strand of thought.
And then there are perhaps the most undisciplinable of Marxists, who work primarily with the spatiotemporal. Walter Benjamin’s conception of revolutionary time, for instance, might be something akin to what Skaria calls the historial mode. Skaria’s Derriddean interest in an irrecuperable difference takes him to interpret the historial in a particular way, not unlike Gayatri Spivak’s reframing of the subaltern. However, we might also think with the problem of the subaltern in Gramsci, for whom the question of subaltern collective political will was resolutely aimed at the conditions for the abolition of the general conditions of social domination, despite the iterative sublation (that is, preservation and cancellation) of prior forms of domination in the hegemonic apparatus. Note the multiplicity of spatiotemporal moments within this formulation. Questions of presence and absence in Gramsci’s dialectics are also always earthly, fleshy, concrete, embodied, and materially instantiated, not quite waiting to be liberated but not irrecuperable either.
While Benjamin and Gramsci conceive of the spacetimes of revolution differently, both of them break from a kind of stratigraphic Marxism of the Second International, for which the scientific determination of a subterranean structure has something to say about opportune moments for revolutionary politics. Benjamin’s relationship to Surrealism takes us to a different tradition of thinking of ‘relational’ spacetimes as part of the making of revolutionary or abolitionist political cultures. And here, Robin D. G. Kelley is a singular historian for his ability to think with the dissident imaginations of Black Surrealism while also attending to what I have posed as ham-fisted questions of interracial proletarian radicalism.
Finally, I would like to make a plea for more reflection not just on an evanescent present or on our fidelity to debates about particular pasts but also on the question of the future, keeping in mind the triad of spatiotemporal relations we always already live with and think through. Can we move on from the charge of presentism to more deliberate futurism, with the determinate future that lies before us, as the late Srinivas Aravamudan argued in his final writings? With the planetary crisis in our spatial-historical frame, we can no longer continue to fulfill the adage that it is more difficult to imagine the end of capitalism/ imperialism than the end of the world.
Sharad Chari, of the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley and WiSER at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, is an interdisciplinary geographer exploring the intersections of geography, anthropology, and history. His academic path from a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley to roles at prestigious institutions worldwide has led to significant contributions in Marxist agrarian studies and critiques of global industrial practices. His seminal works include "Fraternal Capital," a study on industrial work in South India, "Gramsci at Sea," which applies an oceanic Marxism lens, and "Apartheid Remains," examining the lasting effects of apartheid in South Africa. Chari's scholarship challenges traditional geographical boundaries, urging a reimagined understanding of space that captures the complexities of human and environmental narratives.
-Prepared with the editorial assistance of Charles Milne-Home
Endnotes
[i] Aravamudan, Srinivas. “The Catachronism of Climate Change.” Diacritics 41, no.3 (2013): 6-30.
[ii] Harvey, David. “Dialectics of Spacetime.” In Dialectics for the New Century, edited by Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith, 98–117. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
[iii] Ramaswamy, Sumathi. The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
[iv] Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon, 1995.